Since the proliferation of the internet in the mid-90s the information provided therein has drastically grown in quantity and quality. Along with such growth, the popularity of search engines as a means to efficiently navigate through this sea of information has also risen. The search engines, which is an online database system operated by search service providers such as Yahoo, collect enormous amounts of information from numerous resource locators such as web pages and classify many directories according to their subjects, so as to lead users to desired information through hypertext techniques.
Meanwhile, the internet has evolved from a simple resource sharing and file transferring medium to an interactive business medium, bringing electronic commerce, or e-commerce as it is commonly known, to its new culmination. Nowadays, various products are not only provided to online consumers by the sites run by volume retailers, but also by individuals or small retailers through various online trading or marketplace sites, such as Auction and eBay. Such small retailers post the information on the product they desire to sell on the marketplace sites and wait for a consumer to respond. The product information may include text data, such as the product name and description, and image data, such as the image file containing the picture of the product. In order to post the product information, the product information is registered on a database (DB) server run by one of the marketplace service providers. The consumer has to visit the website operated by the above marketplace service provider to know of the product on sale by the retailers. However, just displaying the product information on the marketplace website may not provide enough product exposure to lure and land the best deal with the consumer.
As explained above, the search engines provide powerful tool in retrieving the desired information from the internet the search service provider maintains a search service DB server, which contains resource locators such as URLs (Universal Resource Locators) and shorthand information on the information to be retrieved. However, the conventional search service providers do not maintain commercial information, such as the information on the products on sale at the search service DB server. Hence, the consumer cannot approach the product information using the conventional search engines. Some small retailers set up personal blog sites, image boxes or other UCC (User Created Contents) sites with the product information and its URL, so that the product information may be searched by the consumer using the search engine. However, setting up UCC sites for the sole purpose of advertising the product on sale is not only costly and cumbersome to the retailers but also may be a waste of valuable internet resources. Therefore, there is needed a method and apparatus for automatically enabling the product information registered at a marketplace website to searched by a search engine.